A jury on Wednesday ordered a Santa Ana hospital chain to pay a physician $500,000 in punitive damages on top of $5.2 million it awarded him Friday in a notorious 2006 planted-gun case.

The chain’s attorney, David Robinson, argued that money-losing Integrated Healthcare Holdings Inc., owner of Western Medical Center – Santa Ana “simply does not have the money.”

The punitive damages award was a fraction of the $46.8 million sought by Ted Mathews, attorney for infectious-disease specialist Michael Fitzgibbons. But he and Fitzgibbons said they were pleased by the total $5.7 million verdict.

It’s unclear what IHHI will do next. IHHI chief executive Ken Westbrook said he will discuss the verdict with his board of directors.

Fitzgibbons, a former WestMed chief of staff, was arrested and handcuffed in the physicians’ parking lot and strip-searched in the Santa Ana city jail in June 2006 after police discovered a gun and black gloves in his car. Fitzgibbons denied the gun was his, and no charges were ever filed.

“I’m grateful and humbled (by the verdict),” Fitzgibbons said Wednesday. “The jury found that IHHI committed these acts, these outrageous acts.”

Fitzgibbons handed each of the jurors a thank-you note as they left the courtroom.

The trial leading to the $5.2 million verdict took two weeks.

The trial leading to the $500,000 punitive award took all of one day.

Since jurors already had decided IHHI was at fault, the one-day mini-trial revolved around the ability of IHHI to pay.

Robinson, the IHHI attorney, portrayed his company as if he were offering it to a particularly undiscriminating undertaker. With a stock price ranging over the past year between 3 cents and 11 cents per share, and with $70 million in debt, the company’s true value is at best $23 million, he said. It rarely has even $10 million in cash to spare.

“I submit you really have sent a message,” he told the jurors. “On the best of days, you’ve taken half of IHHI’s cash” for Fitzgibbons.

Mathews, Fitzgibbons’ lawyer, saw things differently.

Even at IHHI’s lowest ebb, in the fall of 2009 when its lender, Medical Capital Holdings, was seized by federal regulators for operating a Ponzi scheme, shutting off $16 million in IHHI assets, the company still managed to make payroll.

“Anytime they need the money, they get the money,” Mathews said.

On Tuesday, IHHI reported that it had lost $13.4 million in the three months that ended Dec. 31. Since the company was founded in 2004, it has run up an accumulated deficit of $86.1 million.

Nonetheless, Chief Financial Officer Steven Blake said under questioning by Mathews that the company was doing alright.

With the trial over after six years, Fitzgibbons returns to WestMed as a doctor rather than a litigant.

Asked how he felt about that, Fitzgibbons replied, “I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’m concerned. The management that engineered this conspiracy, some of them are still there. I have the greatest respect for the nurses, the physician staff. My only concern was to protect them.”